On the 16th of November, on the eve of the 15th Guangzhou International Auto Show, Guangzhou Auto (GAC) held a pre-show introduction of its strategic vision of the future, along the lines of "Intelligence and Enjoyment," and it presented the new electric iSPACE concept car

Which upcoming electric car has more than 200 prototypes on the road that have now covered 1.5 million miles of testing? What claims by Tesla caused some head-scratching among battery engineers? This is our look back at the Week In Reverse—right here at Green Car Reports—for the week ending on Friday, December 8, 2017. Friday, we...

As 15,364 scientists from 184 countries just signed a dire warning to humanity for failing to act accordingly to the threats of climate change, I think it is time to refresh the 2015 publication from Norwegian psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes: What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming

MIT's MindHandHeart coalition and the Division of Student Life recently hosted its annual Wellness Fair in the Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center, featuring more than two dozen wellness-related campus resources for students to learn more about.
To encourage students to learn about all the resources that MIT has to offer, each participant received a student passbook. The objective was to collect a sticker from each office listed to claim a Wellness Warrior T-shirt. By the end of the night, more than 400 student passbooks …

J-PAL North America, a research center in the MIT Department of Economics, is announcing two calls for proposals designed to help policymakers better fight poverty. The competitions invite state and local governments and health care organizations to apply for support answering their priority policy questions using randomized evaluations.
State and local governments are increasingly looking to data and evidence to make better-informed decisions on behalf …

Duke Energy announced Wednesday that it has taken full control of California-based commercial solar developer REC Solar. The acquisition comes after Duke acquired a majority stake in the company in 2015.
Duke spokeswoman Tammie McGee said it was assumed an acquisition would take place eventually, but that Duke accelerated the timeline in response to market dynamics.
"As we see more and more companies, and especially corporates, becoming interested in renewable energy, it became clear that putting our …

Something feels different. In the last two years, there's been a material shift in the way renewable energy and other distributed resources are discussed.
For so long, believers of wind, solar, batteries and microgrids have focused on targeted government support. But direct subsidies and mandates are diminishing in importance.
One example: utility-scale solar in the U.S., which was once almost exclusively driven by state mandates and tax credits, is now mostly being driven by economics. And tax credits are …

The Sun Exchange offers the ability to buy in to solar projects at probably the smallest possible level, by purchasing individual solar cells in small projects, after which the owners can reap their share of the revenue generated by the sale of electricity from those cells

New York has now become the fourth US state to introduce energy storage targets and mandates through its state legislature after Governor Andrew Cuomo approved a bill to develop an Energy Storage Deployment Program and to implement an energy storage procurement target for 2030.

Croatian president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović visited MIT on Monday, discussing research and innovation policy, and bestowing two medals upon MIT Professor Marin Soljačić.
The state visit began in the office of MIT President L. Rafael Reif, who greeted Grabar-Kitarović and engaged with her in a discussion, partly about the need to have more women pursue careers in science, engineering, and mathematics. Reif also exchanged formal gifts with Grabar-Kitarović.
While in the MIT president's office, …

Today, we have a bit of a Tesla puzzle, a name for BMW's electric SUV, Leafs coming off the lines, and a Twitter poll on alternative fuels. All this and more on Green Car Reports. The long-awaited Tesla Model 3 is still in the future for all but a few reservation-holders, but one reader has now configured his Model 3, and told us how it went. You...

Since Tesla's reveal of its new Semi and Roadster models, many technical analysts have been left scratching their collective heads. How can Tesla promise performance metrics far exceeding what's currently physically and economically possible? According to one analyst, it may not be a matter of what batteries can do now, but what they...

For the first time, physicists have developed a technique that can peer deep beneath the surface of a material to identify the energies and momenta of electrons there.
The energy and momentum of these electrons, known as a material's “band structure,” are key properties that describe how electrons move through a material. Ultimately, the band structure determines a material's electrical and optical properties.
The team, at MIT and Princeton University, has used the technique to probe a semiconducting sheet …

October 2017 was the second warmest October in 137 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.
Last month was +0.90 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean October temperature from 1951-1980, just barely warmer than October 2016 (+0.89 °C). The warmest month of October according to the analysis happened in 2015 (+1.08 °C).
The GISTEMP monthly temperature anomalies …

A $4.8 billion plan released Thursday from South Carolina Electric & Gas Company would put money back in the wallets of the state's ratepayers and use solar power and natural gas to make up for the cancellation of the V.C. Summer nuclear plant.
Nuclear watchers have held up the South Carolina plant as an example of the last gasping breath of large scale nuclear in the U.S. While the overdue, costly …

“Ninety thousand solar lanterns sold last quarter,” said Mr. Li. He was sharing sales numbers for his solar appliance business in Ethiopia and I couldn't believe it.
To put that number in perspective, the Global Off-grid Lighting Association pegs the average number of all solar lighting products sold in Ethiopia in a single quarter at around 250,000 units. Close to 80 perent of Ethiopians live in rural areas with little to no access to electricity. Assuming two lanterns for every household with an average five …